Saturday, March 29, 2008

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT

After running with a pair of GeForce 7900 GT PCIe 256MB PCIe cards, I've decided to make the jump to a pair of GeForce 8800 GT 512MB cards. The 7900s just aren't able to run Oblivion well at all, not even at 1280x720 with moderate detail settings. Everything I've heard about the various 8800 series cards is that a single 8800 will beat out a pair of 7900 cards.

Well, we'll see if that's true. According to 3DMark06, I should manage to see about a 2x improvement in FPS from the pair of 8800 GT cards. I've been waiting on this upgrade for 6 months, not sure which 8800 card to purchase. But the key benefits of the 8800 GT series cards are:

- 65nm tech instead of 90nm tech on the GTS/GTX cards
- 110W peak draw vs ~150W peak draw for the 8800 GTS and 8800 GTX
- performs as well as the 9600 GT
- price is very reasonable
- 512MB vs my old 256MB card
- scales well in SLI mode until you run past the video memory limit

So I'll have a card that is roughly 2x powerful, draws only a modest amount of power, and is DX 10 capable.

Note: In terms of performance, it goes GTS (lower) -> GT -> GTX (higher). The GTX cards are very expensive, and the GTS cards are usually less expensive. So the GT cards usually end up as the mid-range card that offers a lot of power for the price.

...

Updates (Apr 2nd): Installed the new 8800 GTs and am working on running 3DMark06. The old numbers were in the 7500-7600 range.

Dual 8800 GT in SLI mode:

10283 3DMarks
(4301 SM2 5801 HDR 2004 CPU)

Oblivion is a bit smoother, but seems to now be CPU-bottlenecked, so I may need to upgrade my Athlon64 X2 5200+ to something faster down the road. Unfortunately, the higher speed X2s are a lot more demanding on the power supply and put out a good bit more heat. The Phenom X4s (quad-core) may be a good choice in about another 3-6 months.

Labels: 2008, Benchmarks, NVIDIA

posted by Wuphon's at 1:09 PM